And this is Teddy, a very sweet and traditional looking crochet bear amigurumi.

Most of my crochet animals are made with Istex Lett Lopi, a rough and fuzzy 100% wool yarn from Iceland. But this Teddy bear I made with another kind of yarn. I found it in a local shop and just fell in love with it.

It was such a soft and beautiful coloured yarn, just perfect for a little Teddy. All I remember is that it was a Phildar worsted weight yarn. It’s not available anymore but that doesn’t really matter, there are so many suitable yarns to make a cute Teddy and I bet it isn’t hard to find these colours.

I designed this bear as a ‘quick to crochet’ pattern. It will only take you a day to make this bear. It’s not a big bear, but if you want to make a bigger bear, just use the heaviest yarn and the hook that works best with it to get a significantly larger bear.

Here are some more pictures of the finished crochet bear and below them you can find info about & links to buy the pattern.

This crochet bear amigurumi is made with fuzzy worsted weight yarn. Teddy is sitting 5.5 inch / 14 cm. The pattern contains a clear and colour coded description of how to crochet and assemble this animal, with extra illustrations and example pictures at the bottom to help you get everything right. In the pattern you can also find what materials you need, the yarn colour numbers, in short, everything you need to know to make your own sweet Teddy bear. All the additional information you need to know about this pattern you can find in the shop listings.The pattern for this crochet teddy bear you can find in my shop at Craftsy and in my Ravelry shop. You can also order it directly from me here. The pattern is written in standard American crochet terms.

Animal safety eyes and other nice looking animal eyes can be hard to find. When I started making amigurumi, I couldn’t find stores where I could buy them, so I had to come up with an alternative.

I went to my local hobby store to see what they had to offer. There I found something very suitable, called brads. They come in all kind of sizes and shapes and the black round ones make perfect eyes. The one thing that wasn’t perfect, they aren’t shiny. I had to make them shiny myself then. The first thing I thought of was transparent nail polish and that actually did the job very well. A few layers of it and an afternoon of drying made the eyes perfectly shiny and smooth.

Here are some pictures of the brads and how they look as eyes on a crochet animal. There’s also a picture of another way to make particular eyes. Below the images I’ll explain how it works. (You can click on the image to get a larger version.)

The last image is of normal safety eyes with a felt patch behind it.

How does it work?

First, pin the brads to a pin cushion or something else you can put them into, so they stand up steady and you can nail polish them. Attach a layer of nail polish. If the first layer looks perfect, it’s good, if it’s not smooth enough yet, add another layer when the first layer is dry. When you’re satisfied, let your brads dry for a while, I let them dry for a night before using them.

Make sure the nail polish is completely dried out when you attach the eyes, otherwise you’ll damage them. At first only the upper layer is dry and not very steady. When it’s perfectly dry, it should stay undamaged even if you scratch it. If you like, you can paint various coloured eyes with nail polish, like a blue eye with a black pupil. And my advice, polish a bunch of eyes in advance and keep them safe till you need them.

When you use brads as eyes you need to make sure the paws won’t stick out of the crochet ‘skin’. If you crochet very tight it might not happen but you can also add a piece of paper(board) or felt between the paws and the inside of the piece, so when the paws are spread they only touch felt or paper.

To give more character to some eyes, you can add a piece of felt behind the eyes on the outside. In the crochet bunny picture you can see I used brown felt behind the eyes, and the Link amigurumi has white felt behind normal safety eyes.

Another tip:

If you use felt for characteristic eyes, you can dye it first with acrylic paint, to make it more strong. I did that with the Link amigurumi’s eyes. Because without the paint the felt fell apart when I cut it in the right shape. Whit the paint on it, it stayed felty but much stronger and easier to cut.

One last note:

I do NOT think the alternative eyes are safe for little kids toys, so use safety eyes if you make them for a little kid.